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John Randolph, the music critic and social commentator better known as Jay Smooth of Animal New York, has recorded an episode of his vodcast series, Ill Doctrine, dedicated to a recent outbreak of harassment in the gamer community.

Among a range of comments directed at Sarkeesian was a comparison to Emma Goldman. Which was probably intended as an insult. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Specifically, Mr. Smooth is talking about the case of Anita Sarkeesian, an academic and commentator in the field of video games and women's studies. Her offense was to set up a Kickstarter campaign asking for funds for a series of short films analyzing and critiquing the representations of women in video games. This led to the usual threats and abuse but also, more imaginatively, attempts to google-link her name to obscene terms, post pornographic images on her Wikipedia page and get to the bottom of any Jewish heritage she might possess.

The full story, along with a sampling of the comments she received, can be found on Sarkeesian's site, Feminist Frequency. A word of warning - this is strong stuff. The people taking issue with her project pull no punches when it comes to making their feelings known. Or, depending on who you talk to, the feelings they are pretending to have in order to troll more successfully.

(Trolling is a competitive Internet sport a little like trawling and a little like trilling, involving trying to draw Internet users into your net with tempting calls.)

The story has a happy ending, at least for Sarkeesian: the level and ferocity of the attacks touched a nerve, the story was repeated across the Internet and her Kickstarter appeal has been funded far beyond its original level. She may now have to throw some lightsaber duels into her film project, just to burn off the excess capital. And it has opened up a dialog about the best way for grievances to be expressed on the web, to which Smooth's video message, delivered in his trademark style, is contributing.

"You - and by you I mean we - have an obligation to speak out against it more often"

It's actually rather hard to find a counterpoint to this above rather than below the comments fold. Jim Sterling of Destructoid, an uninhibited speaker whom relatively few feminists are currently worshipping in effigy, complained that he would not normally fund a self-produced video series, because he felt they could and should be self-funded, but now he had to, in order to counterbalance the harassment:

So now, because of an inscrutably weird subset of gamers, I am going to be short ten bucks. I don't believe in funding online video serials via Kickstarter because I don't find such plans ambitious enough to not be self-funded. Even so, now I am going to have to do it just to assuage my surrogate privileged guilt. So thanks, *******s.

A now-defunct document entitled "Men vs Tropes in Video Games" - a reference to the title of Sarkeesian's planned series - proposed a list of discriminatory elements against men in video games, and actually made some solid points, despite being a joke aimed at trolling (that word again) games journalists.

(UPDATE - The architects of "Men vs Tropes in Video Games" - or at least somebody thus representing - have reached out to say that their project is now back on, and serious this time, with a request for funds up on Indiegogo (the Kickstarter for emos). I will not link to it here, since the last page was rapidly filled with pornography and obscenity, but it should be easy enough to find using the search engine of your choice. I talk about the project in the comments to this article: the short version is that as an artistic or polemic project it is likely to fail because it is trying to run between too many bases. It would be better, if the aim was to critique the preponderance of bone-headed killing machines among the male characters in video games, to focus on that, rather than trying also to make "fetch" happen with misandry and to open another front against Anita Sarkeesian.)

Frustratingly for the seeker after fair and balanced journalism, however, few luminaries of the industry have felt minded to put their names into the lists on the side of the people telling Sarkeesian to get back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich. We can only speculate as to their reasons. A couple of readers of this blog have, while discussing related matters, explained that Sarkeesian brought the harassment on herself, since everybody knows that short films cost nothing to make and her appeal therefore looked like a scam. It's not much of a defense, but apparently that's the case for it.

I wasn’t sure if I could even raise the initial $6,000, so I’ve been completely overwhelmed, inspired and encouraged by the response, to put it mildly.

In the end, the market decided - and, as fans of the free market, I'm sure Forbes readers can sympathize with her treatment, celebrate her success and look forward to her output. I look forward to seeing "Tropes vs Women in Video Games" and then expressing an informed opinion about its quality.